Full Description
Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and—sometimes unwittingly—discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Based on case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), Joshua Sperber analyzes how online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community wherever we can find it. This book explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors.
Contents
Introduction: We're All Managers Now (and We're Doing It for Free)
Chapter 1: How the Consumer Was Invented (and Is Being Reinvented): A Brief History of the Consumer
Chapter 2: Yelp: Working for Pleasure (and to Make Others Rich)
Chapter 3: Rate My Professors: A's (and Debt) for Everyone!
Chapter 4: Conclusion
